


solitude

by mariya



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Hurt, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 15:13:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariya/pseuds/mariya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, Stiles felt so</p>
<p>small.</p>
            </blockquote>





	solitude

Sometimes, when Stiles stayed awake through the early hours of the morning to make sure no wolf, stray or tamed, ended up dead when the sun rose, he'd remember what was bringing all these tired kids to their knees and feel so sick he forgot how to function.  
  
It always snuck up on him, coiled around his ankles and moved up his ribs until it clasped at his throat and clenched, forcing him to hold his breath and open his eyes to see how small he'd become. And Stiles, Stiles tried to shrink back. He tried to block everything out, every bad thing that made him feel helpless and weak. How suddenly, only a year ago, he had been tall, and now kept shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.  
  
And if Stiles became any smaller he was scared he'd disappear all together.  
  
So, on nights like these, Stiles slipped away and tried to get someplace that wasn't so big and empty like his home or the woods. He tried his closet, but its narrow walls did nothing to cancel out the looming darkness surrounding his room. It took more footwork to find his refuge, 24-hour diners, coffee shops, places where he'd be alone but with company. But the problem was was that Stiles could only sit there, drinking some crudely blended frappucino for an hour before getting too sick to even think about himself anymore.  
  
Then he got into movies.  
  
It started out with _The Help_. He hadn't meant to go see it— hell, he didn't even know it was out in theaters. He wanted to see _21 Jump Street_ but forgot it was rated R and couldn't get into the movie. So Stiles went to whatever other movie was showing which happened to be _The Help_.  
  
Only half the seats were filled, and the moment Stiles sat back, he knew this was the place. A truly anonymous setting where you could share a laugh and a cry with strangers clouded in the dark, and afterward forget the other ever existed.  
  
And so the era of movie-going began, and every time Stiles felt the knot build in his stomach, he'd rush over to catch a late movie. By the end of the year, Stiles came up with so many ticket stubs he couldn't even count. He just tossed them into the lower drawer of his desk and left them there. A drawer full of the pieces he began losing and a half-built heart.  
  
It didn't go unnoticed either. Whenever Scott and company asked him out to the movies, Stiles would shake his head and say he'd already caught the film three times and that was enough. And whenever Derek came climbing into Stiles's room, he'd be lucky if he had to wait an hour for him to get home. If he waited more than three, he'd ask:  
  
"Where've you been?"  
  
And Stiles would make an amused face and drop a ticket stub into his drawer like so many coins in a piggie bank. "Don't worry about it. What do you have for me, Q?"  
  
***  
  
Dozens of movies per week, hundreds of glass shards and no glue.  
  
There was something much bigger out there, and Stiles knew it. He saw it in Gerard, in Jackson, in Deaton and Lydia and Peter and somewhere along the line he stopped feeling like himself. He stopped feeling safe. He stopped wanting to go out even to the movies. All Stiles wanted to do was stay in bed, stay a little closer to his dad because even though his gun could do nothing against what Stiles was at war with, he still felt a little more safe when his dad was around, clattering around the kitchen to make coffee for two.  
  
But now nothing could save him.  
  
He was going to be plucked from the sky while no one was watching and he would disappear completely


End file.
